Monday, January 02, 2006

Happy New Year.

I like New Year's. I like the contrived opportunity it provides to reflect on the past year and look to the one ahead. I like reading other people's resolutions. I like thinking about what new things the world has learned this year.

Advice is plentiful this time of year. It seems everyone has an opinion on which resolutions to make, how to keep them, and even how to fix the ones you couldn't keep last year.

Just remember that goal-setting and reflection are no subsitute for action. Roethke cautioned us: "Self-contemplation is a curse / That makes an old confusion worse." In fact, recent studies have shown that too much self-analysis can do much more harm than good, and that we should try to go more with our gut feeling on things. This goes against conventional wisdom, but echoes the main drive of Malcolm Gladwell's argument in Blink: "There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis."

If we really should trust our instincts more than logic and deductive reasoning, then maybe we should resist the urge to over-analyze how we've done this past year. As Timothy Wilson recommends in "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right": "If we are dissatisfied with some aspect of our lives, one of the best approaches is to act more like the person we want to be, rather than sitting around analyzing ourselves."

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